St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)

               August 1, 2003 Friday Five Star Late Lift Edition

Pg. B10

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

   Plan wasn't so dumb

   Despite all the hysterical howling about "betting on terror" and how
"unbelievably stupid" the now-canceled Policy Analysis Market system would have
been, there is real science behind the plan. It's called Thomas Bayes' Theorem
of Subjective Probability, and it is the very means by which John Craven located
a missing H-bomb in the Mediterranean some years ago. Normal analysis had failed
to find the bomb, so Craven started holding rounds of betting pools with bottles
of scotch as the prize, and the bomb was finally found just where the bets all
clustered. Craven used the same means to locate the wreckage of USS Scorpion.

   Maybe the PR could have been handled better, but we've now scrapped a proven
tool that may have actually helped prevent terror attacks simply because a few
in Congress wanted to play politics with it.

   It might have served your paper well had the writer of the editorial
"Unbelievably stupid" researched the topic a little to provide some insight as
to why the Pentagon may have devised the plan in the first place.

   Jim Trimble

   Affton